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It is suggested that multiplicity is a falling away from The
Unity, infinity being the complete departure, an innumerable
multiplicity, and that this is why unlimit is an evil and we evil
at the stage of multiplicity.
A thing, in fact, becomes a manifold when, unable to remain
self-centred, it flows outward and by that dissipation takes
extension: utterly losing unity it becomes a manifold since there
is nothing to bind part to part; when, with all this outflowing,
it becomes something definite, there is a magnitude.
But what is there so grievous in magnitude?
Given consciousness, there will be, since the thing must feel its
exile, its sundrance from its essence. Everything seeks not the
alien but itself; in that outward moving there is frustration or
compulsion; a thing most exists not when it takes multiplicity or
extension but when it holds to its own being, that is when its
movement is inward. Desire towards extension is ignorance of the
authentically great, a movement not on the appropriate path but
towards the strange; to the possession of the self the way is
inward.
Consider the thing that has taken extension; broken into so many
independent items, it is now those several parts and not the
thing it was; if that original is to persist, the members must
stand collected to their total; in other words, a thing is itself
not by being extended but by remaining, in its degree, a unity:
through expansion and in the measure of the expansion, it is less
itself; retaining unity, it retains its essential being.
Yet the universe has at once extension and beauty?
Yes; because it has not been allowed to slip away into the
limitless but is held fast by unity; and it has beauty in virtue
of Beauty not of Magnitude; it needed Beauty to parry that
magnitude; in the degree of its extension it was void of beauty
and to that degree ugly. Thus extension serves as Matter to
Beauty since what calls for its ordering is a multiplicity. The
greater the expansion, the greater the disorder and ugliness.
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